Anybody who saw Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live shaking her
ripe baby belly at Sarah Palin as if it were a huge fleshy
pompom had to be impressed. She's rapping! And dancing! On
national TV! In front of a possible future veep! A week before
she delivers! Pregnant women can do anything!

That opinion, apparently, is not universally shared.
October 31 marks the 30th anniversary of the Pregnancy
Discrimination Act (PDA), which outlawed employment
discrimination against women who are Poehler-ized. But the
news that pregnant women need to be treated as would any
employee with a broken leg or other temporary disability  i.e., not get fired or demoted  seems to have not quite
sunk in. Complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) are on a decade-long rise, up 65% from 1992
to 2007. And the number of cases the EEOC has decided to take
on has quadrupled in the same period.

"We would expect that pregnancy bias would be a non-issue
by now, 30 years after passage of the PDA," says Christine
Nazer, a spokesperson for the EEOC. Yet in 2007, claims hit a
record of 5,587, and the commission won nearly $2 million for
women who claimed they'd been sold up the creek for being up
the duff. Pregnancy claims are still a very small part of the
cases the EEOC deals with and haven't grown nearly as fast as
charges of false dismissal for retaliation, religion or
national origin. Possibly that's because pregnancy
discrimination is underreported. "Many women, especially
professionals, may view charge filings and litigation as
'career killers,'" says Nazer, "and others may not be inclined
to fight an organization with a baby on the way for fear of
termination or other retaliation."

A new study by the non-partisan National Partnership for
Women and Families looked closely at the EEOC's figures for
the decade between 1996 and 2005 and found that more than half
of the complaints came not from the more traditionally
chauvinistic mining or building trades but from five
female-heavy industries: retail, services, finance, real
estate and insurance. "One of the most ironic cases was that
of a maternity store that had a policy of not hiring pregnant
employees," says Jocelyn Frye, General Counsel for the
Partnership.

While it seems reasonable that the highest number of
complaints would come from the industries with the most women,
it's also true that the percentage of the work force made up by
women has only increased marginally in the same period  from 57.8% to 59.3%  not nearly enough to account for the
jump in claims of pregnancy-related dismissals. Especially
worrying is that 75% of the claims were made by women of
color.

What then lies behind the rise? "There seems to be an
underlying assumption that a woman will not be as interested
in her work or as committed to her work once she's pregnant or
has had a baby," says Frye. This remains true even though
studies show more women, including governors of Alaska and TV
stars, are working later into their 40 weeks. What goes
unspoken, of course, is that while pregnancy is a temporary
disability, motherhood could be considered a permanent one,
dividing women's attention for at least the next 18 years.

Obviously, there are financial reasons why a firm might
not want to hire a pregnant woman: her health insurance will
be more expensive and she'll have to take some leave in the
foreseeable future. Even so, if it can be proved that that's
the only reason she wasn't hired, that firm could be facing
the EEOC. "You can imagine the slippery slope," says Frye.
"First it's, 'Don't hire a pregnant woman.' Then it becomes,
'Don't hire a woman at all, because she could get pregnant and
is likely to be the primary caregiver.'"

Then there are the studies that suggest that pregnant
women just plain gross some people out. In one, people who
viewed videotapes of non-pregnant women and visibly pregnant
women doing the same task judged the pregnant women more
negatively (and no, the activity was not smoking. Or sit-ups.)

That bias may stem from an urge to give pregnant women
lesser duties. "People may feel they're doing the right
thing," suggests Frye. "But they're not."